For gay and lesbian individuals, consistency in parents’ attitudes toward their child’s sexual orientation, even when they are negative, is an important factor in positive mental health outcomes, new research shows.
Michael Verdun
Study investigator Matthew Verdun, MS, a licensed marriage and family therapist and doctoral student at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology at Los Angeles, California, found that gays and lesbians whose parents were not supportive of their sexual orientation could still have good outcomes.
The findings were presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, which was held as a virtual live event.
High rates of mental illness
Research shows that members of the gay and lesbian community experience higher rates of mental illness and substance use disorders and that psychological well-being declines during periods close to when sexual orientation is disclosed.
Mr. Verdun referred to a theory in the literature of homosexual identity formation that describes how individuals go through six stages: confusion, comparison, tolerance, acceptance, pride, and synthesis.
Research shows a U-shaped relationship between subjective reports of well-being at these six stages. The lowest rates occur during the identity comparison and identity tolerance stages.
“Those stages roughly correspond with the time when people would disclose their sexual orientation to parents and family members. The time when a person discloses is probably one of the most anxious times in their life; it’s also where their rate of well-being is the lowest,” said Mr. Verdun.
Mr. Verdun said he “wanted to know what happens when a parent is supportive or rejecting at that moment, but also what happens over time.”
To determine whether parental support affects depression, anxiety, or substance abuse in members of the gay and lesbian community, Mr. Verdun studied 175 individuals who self-identified as gay or lesbian (77 males and 98 females) and were recruited via social media. Most (70.3%) were of White race or ethnicity.
Participants completed surveys asking about their parents’ initial and current level of support regarding their sexual orientation. They also completed the nine-item Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9), the seven-item General Anxiety Disorder (GAD-7), and the 20-item Drug Abuse Screening Tool (DAST-20).
The investigators categorized participants into one of three groups on the basis of parental support:
- Consistently positive.
- Negative to positive.
- Consistently negative.
A fourth group, positive to negative, was excluded from the analysis because it was too small.
Mr. Verdun was unable analyze results for substance abuse. “The DAST-20 results violated the assumption of homogeneity of variances, which meant the analysis could result in error,” he explained.
Analyses for the PHQ-9 and GAD-7 showed that the consistently positive group had the lowest symptom scores.
“People whose parents were accepting had the lowest scores for anxiety and depression,” said Mr. Verdun.
For both the PHQ and GAD, the findings were significant (P < .05) for the consistently positive and the consistently negative groups in comparison with the negative to positive group.
The difference between the consistently positive and the consistently negative groups was not statistically significant.